I will preface this with the fact that I work "with" AI professionally, but I don't work for a major AI players or model creators.
Just so everyone is aware. There is a social-war going on around AI. It's unquestionably about what AI actually means. It's about power, greed, and fear as a tool to control AI.
Influencers and pretty much anyone who could have some sort of impact on public opinion are being offered money left and right to talk pro or negatively about AI in an attempt to sway public opinion and trigger government action.
The CEOs of the AI companies are intentionally creation a perception in an attempt to force governmental control so that they can consolidate power around it and therefore consolidate everything that comes with it. That includes China and even US companies in some cases.
There are fear-mongers also trying to do this from the anti-AI side to accomplish the same thing. Then there are "parrots" who are just repeating the ignorance and fear-mongering because they've been duped by other fear-mongering.
In truth, AI is not a genie that is going to put back in the bottle, but it's also not what everyone is saying it is.
I'm not here to BS you, but I will tell you this. Is AI dangerous? AI itself is not, what is is how PEOPLE will use it. AI war machines can make decisions faster than humans can. AI can find vulnerabilities faster than humans can. This is truly a scary things, but the opposite is also true. AI can find and report issues very quickly to secure the very threat that AI can locate.
What I'm trying to say is it's a two-way street. What that means in real-life is, you absolutely cannot ignore or stifle AI's advancement. You must ride the wave of it. If you don't, someone else will and you will be even more vulnerable to it.
AI uses enormous amounts of power: Yes, this is 100% true. You obviously can't throw everything at it, but the US has a major advantage. It has resources most other countries do not have. This is an advantage, but other countries are also catching up.
China is copying our models and that is a threat: Yes, but it's also a benefit. These open source models bring both the price of AI down and their technology that makes this more efficient (power and hardware wise) is falling quickly. Memory, GPUs, and storage are sky-high right now, but AI's requirements are dropping quickly. (careful if you are investing in Nvidia, SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, etc) They are spending enormous amounts of money and the need is going to collapse when the data center buildout collapses. (it will)
In the end, open source models are extremely important, but while OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic will say yes they are important. In truth, they have no way to pay investors back the hundreds of billions of dollars they took in when AI becomes a commodity.
AI is already running on your smartphone. Anthropic is charging enormous amounts of money for tokens that free open source models charge cents for. This is a threat to their business model. The fact that hardware requirements are dropping quickly and the technology that makes it happen is open source is a direct threat to their service! Soon, for the price of a computer, you will have a private AI you can run at home without paying OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta.
Lets talk about jobs. Will AI displace jobs? Yes, some of them. Will it displace a majority of jobs? Absolutely not. Actually, it will change your job in one form or another. AI isn't a 100% replacement. I'm an IT guy who does infrastructure, software development, security, and hardware and networks. I'm an Internet and Enterprise architect. My job has changed immensely, but my core knowledge (domain knowledge) is incredibly important because AI alone cannot take over my position. It only changed how I work.
Today, I use AI as a partner. It helps accelerate how I work. My job has become more oversight and project management. I do the architecture and I use AI to help validate what I'm doing, but I also validate what AI thinks we should do. AI doesn't have domain knowledge of my environment, so while it makes suggestions. I determine if those suggestions work in my environment. AI will tell you this is what you should do, but real-world experience in your working environment may not agree with that. That is your job, you ensure that doesn't happen.
To prove my point. Do your own research about companies that laid off people because of AI and ended up hiring them back. IBM, you name it. They all have done it. The job doesn't get eliminated. The job changes.
If there is one thing I can share with all my Cowboys fans brotherhood. Embrace AI. It is not going away and it is going to change how you operate in the future. Those who know how to use it efficiently, are the ones that will have jobs, because those jobs will demand it. Those who don't will get left behind.
Roughly, 60% of occupations today, did not exist in 1940. Note, the industrial revolution was in the 1800s, yet that sixty percent still remains true. Most jobs in 1980 did not involve a computer. Almost all of them do today. The internet and e-commerce? Yes, they are all in the last 30+ years. Tapes, 8-tracks, CDs, albums. All gone, streaming and smartphones have changed things.
AI is the next major technological movement. You can get on board or you will fall behind. Yes, people will try to abuse it, but that is why we need the collective world population to also rise up and fight the abuse and outpace it. Not run and hide to only become a lamb taken to the slaughter.
You can change or get left behind...
One recommendation I would have is to learn how AI actually works. (read about it!) You would be surprised to find out that it's only a probability machine. It doesn't actually "think" the way you believe humans think. Most of the time, it doesn't know the next word it's going to say until after it said the previous word. In the statement "The capital of Texas is Austin." It didn't know it was going to say Austin until it did math AFTER it said "The capital of Texas is". It did the math and determined the most probable next word was Austin. It didn't actually know the answer was Austin until the math said it was. (ie, it didn't know what it was saying until it actually said it!)
